


Deirdre and the Dementors

by a_t_rain



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: femgenficathon, Gen, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 20:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2665079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs. Crouch in Azkaban.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deirdre and the Dementors

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2010 Femgenficathon.
> 
> In case anyone is wondering "WTF, pelican?" see [here](http://www.sacred-texts.com/lcr/fsca/fsca41.htm).

To be innocent in Azkaban is to have a rickety shelter and a flimsy shield.

Sirius Black, four cells down the corridor from Deirdre Crouch, has known this truth for some time. Deirdre is learning it now. They have not conferred about their experiences, for the prisoners in Azkaban experience the profoundest sort of solitary confinement, isolated inside their own minds. In any case Deirdre would not have listened to Black if she could have spoken with him. She believes herself to be the one innocent soul among the guilty, and Sirius Black to be the arch-traitor, the guiltiest of them all.

Deirdre is innocent and she is dying. These are the two truths that keep her sane. She finds no joy in them – the dementors would be on her in an instant if they tasted joy – but the knowledge is enough to ground her in reality.

She might leave here if she wished; she knows this. All she needs to do is stop taking the Polyjuice potion. The warden will notice that she is the wrong prisoner, a woman, and if his mind is too much dulled by this nightmare world to notice anything, she can cry out to get his attention.

It would mean another trial, the temporary respite of a holding cell at the Ministry in London, which in her case would be likely to become a permanent respite. She would be convicted, of course – convicted of a crime no one has ever committed, nor dreamt of: breaking _into_ Azkaban. She would earn a term in Azkaban in her own right, but she would not live to see the sentence carried out. She might do that. It would mean peace. She thinks she might barter everything for peace, and the sight of human faces around her once again.

_Go on then_ , say the dementors, _why don’t you?_

It would mean betraying her son, and she will not do that.

The dementors know all about it, God knows how. They make her relive the trial, again and again: _Mother, no, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t know! Don’t send me there, don’t let him!_

_You are no son of mine! I have no son!_

She remembers the moment she came to hate her husband. She remembers.

Now and again the dementors grow bored with this scene, and dredge up new ones. Long-forgotten childhood disappointments and adolescent humiliations jostle against moments of far greater weight. She relives the agonizing half-hour she spent flipping through _Witch Weekly_ in the waiting room at St. Mungo’s, anticipating the moment when the Healers would call her in and tell her what she already knew. But these memories do not interest them for long. The rest of her life, yes, even her death causes her little pain in comparison to that hour before the Wizengamot. It is sweet as honey to the dementors, and they swarm to it.

She talks to them, trying to keep her sanity. _I am innocent, and I came here of my free will. You can’t have that part of me. I am innocent._

_Innocent, woman?_

One of the dementors laughs, a high cold sound that makes Deirdre shiver. She has never heard a dementor laugh before. Can they laugh? Or is she going mad at last? She is not sure they can even speak. Perhaps she has been mad for a long time.

_I am not mad. I am sane. I am innocent._

_Funny, that. Your son wasn’t._

_He was, he was! It was a mistake, he’s just a boy – fell in with the wrong crowd of people, and they left him holding the bag._

_Very well, tell yourself that if it makes you happy. But are you so very sure?_

_Stop insinuating – whatever it is that you’re insinuating._

_As you wish; I’ll say it straight out. Your son is guilty. He tortured two people, two Aurors, a mother and father. Tortured them within sight and earshot of their baby son, who will have their screams ringing in his ears for all of his days. Tortured them until they lost their minds. You know what that feels like now, don’t you? You are learning what it is to lose your mind._

_STOP! I will not hear._

_Too late for that. You shall hear. He is guilty; he has tortured, and killed, and he will torture and kill again. That is your doing. You have made him a free man. There will be blood upon your hands._

Deirdre fights for control. She bites the palm of her hand. The pain is real; the rest, she assures herself, is the product of her fevered and tormented mind. _Do you know the future? How is it that you are so sure?_

_We know everything._

_You lie._

_We never lie; only you humans lie, and you do it incessantly, even to yourselves. What we show you is the truth._

_What you show me is a world without mercy or pity. Do you call that truth?_

_That is what truth means, woman. You wouldn’t know, of course. What have you had to do with truth?_

What, indeed? She remembers the life she has lived: an endless round of Ministry parties, with more and more important guests as the years went by. Making excuses for her husband to her son: _of course Daddy wanted to come to your Quidditch match, it’s only that he’s very busy, doing important work for the Minister._ Then later, making excuses for her son to her husband.

_How worthless. Your whole life has been worthless. And now you die, perhaps a few weeks earlier than you might have done, an empty and meaningless sacrifice._

_It is not so. You see into our minds and you know all our sins and frailties and you think that is everything, but this you cannot understand. You think the sacrifice is meaningless if the object is unworthy; I tell you that it is not so. It is a sacrifice still. And you will not understand us humans until you know what drives us to take another human’s suffering upon ourselves, which is the one thing you never will know._

The dementors chortle. _Schooling us, are you?_

_Why, yes. I believe I am._

She steels herself and waits for their next gibe, but it never comes. Instead, she sees a thing she does not understand: a burst of light in the place where there is no light. It envelops her for a moment, like a mist, and then resolves itself into a shape with wings. A great pelican.

Pelican?

Deirdre has no idea what has happened. She left school to marry Bartemius Crouch before her Defense classmates learned about Patronuses; she has never known the form of hers, and now, with her body and mind almost gone, she is only dimly aware that they exist. All she can summon up is an incongruous fragment of a poem she learned as a child: _What a wondrous bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can..._ Deirdre stifles an idiotic gurgle of laughter, a sound that the walls of Azkaban have never heard before. The dementors do not consume her laughter and smother her voice, as they would ordinarily have done. They seem to have fled. This is another wonderful thing that she does not understand.

* * *

It takes the warden and his assistants three days to round up the dementors. By then, Deirdre is dead. She has tasted the peace she longed for, and her war will not come again.

The warden files a report on the incident for the governor, who sends it along to the Ministry. It circles languidly through the Ministry corridors for a while, and at last dies on the desk of the Senior Under-Secretary for Magical Law Enforcement. Much of the evidence about what happened is unreliable; there is only the confused testimony of prisoners who may be half mad already, and the irrefutable fact that the dementors vanished for three days. In any case, no one is anxious to uncover the truth. It would upset the entire penal system if it were true that a corporeal Patronus could be cast wandlessly, and in Azkaban, and by a mere boy at the end of his strength and his life. It is true, of course, that dying wizards sometimes do strange and powerful feats of magic, just as children do, and almost as haphazardly. But the Senior Under-Secretary feels that there is something greater and more inexplicable at work, and it disturbs him. As with all things that he can’t explain, he is eager to cover up all evidence of the incident.

He would be more disturbed yet if he knew that four cells away from the place where the strange thing happened, one of Azkaban’s most notorious prisoners gained a slender purchase on sanity during those three days and has been fighting to keep it.


End file.
